Question

The Selenium Reference documentation says “Selenium does NOT support JavaScript alerts that are generated in a page’s onload() event handler. In this case a visible dialog WILL be generated and Selenium will hang until someone manually clicks OK.”

But how life goes – I happen to have an application that uses onload dialogs. I know of the “browserbot” workaround for previous versions but none of this works anymore for Selenium Webdrivers…

Has anybody tackled this one already?

Answer 1

1. The limitation is only for Selenium RC (which has been oficially deprecated for like a year). Use Selenium WebDriver, if you can. It does not suffer from this limitation. If you use WebDriver, then driver.switchTo().alert() should work as usual.
2. In Java, one can use ‘Robot’ for pressing Enter blindly. That way, I can’t read the dialog’s message, but at least can get rid of it.
3. In C#, there’s SendKeys class for the same thing.
4. You can’t do anything in plain JavaScript, I think.